But I knew better.
She had called me. She had begged me. And I had been too goddamn slow. Too late.
My forehead dropped against hers, her blood smearing across my skin, soaking deep into my clothes until it felt like I was wearing her death. My hands cradled what was left of her, trembling, and I made the only promise left worth making.
If the law wouldn’t take them, I would.
One by one.
I’d make them fall the way she fell. I’d make them beg the way she begged. And when their bones snapped beneath my hands, when their screams tore through the night, the world would hear her again.
Something inside me fractured with that vow - clean, precise, final. The boy she once called a hero died there on the pavement beside her, and what rose in his place was colder. Harder. A shadow with her blood running through its veins.
Her lips were parted, but nothing lingered. No last word. No salvation. Only silence. And that silence haunted me, followed me, gnawed at my ribs like a starving thing. I carried it into the dark until every scream I tore from them filled the void she left behind.
7
LUCIAN
What most people don’t tell you is that blood doesn’t define you. It’s not the crimson running through your veins that binds you to someone. No, it’s the small, silent things. The unspoken promises. The way someone chooses to stay when they have every reason to leave.
Billie Underwood wasn’t my sister by blood. But she was my sister in every way that mattered.
I was fourteen when I found her — nine years old, barefoot, filthy, wandering down Jefferson Avenue in a pink nightgown that hung off her shoulders. Her mother had overdosed hours earlier. The kid looked like an empty ghost trying to remember what home felt like.
I brought her home. My mother didn’t ask a single question. Just gave me that tired, gentle look — the one that said she was too used to patching up the world. When I begged her not to let the state take Billie, she sighed and said, “Then she stays.”
And she did. From that night on, Billie was ours. She slept on the pull-out couch. Ate spaghetti with us on Fridays. Started school two days later with braided hair and a second-hand backpack that smelled like mothballs.
Eventually, she smiled again.
By the time I turned twenty and she was fifteen, my mother was dying. Cancer — slow, cruel, precise. It didn’t just take her; it dismantled her piece by piece. I worked two jobs to keep the lights on, but Billie… Billie became her caretaker. She learned to measure morphine doses, to change bandages, to smile through exhaustion. She sat by her bedside every night, reading those ridiculous romance novels my mom loved, voice cracking but steady.
When I couldn’t be there, Billie was.
She was the one who found a clinical trial — a miracle we’d prayed for. She called every number, argued with every bureaucrat, clung to the idea that the world would give us a break just this once.
It didn’t. The acceptance letter arrived the day after my mother died.
I still remember the sound Billie made when she opened that mailbox. It wasn’t a sob — it was something raw and broken, halfway between rage and disbelief. She dropped to her knees right there on the cracked concrete, clutching that letter like she could rewrite time if she held it hard enough.
She cried harder for my mother than she ever had for her own.
That’s when I understood — blood meant nothing. Not compared to the kind of loyalty that doesn’t need proof.
After that, she was my compass. The only reason I stayed tethered to this world. Until the day she was gone too.
It happened fast. Too fast.
I don’t like to talk about it — not because I forgot, but because I remember too well.
The funeral was empty. Just me, a priest, and the sound of the wind rattling against stained glass. No family. No friends. Noone left who knew her laugh or the way she hummed when she cooked.
When I went home, the silence was unbearable. Every room felt hollow. Her shoes still by the door. Her mug still in the sink. The world kept spinning, cruel and unbothered, while I sat surrounded by ghosts.
That night, I broke.
I cried like a kid. Ugly, choking sobs that tore something out of me. I was angry — at the world, at the system, at myself. I’d promised she’d be safe. I’d lied.
